Alex Obert sent this interview recap in of an interview he recently conducted with former WWE wrestler Tyler Reks. Here are some highlights from the interview:
His advice for wrestlers that get released:
“That’s a tough one. They can always come work for Body Spartan! (laughs) The door is wide open for any of my brothers in the wrestling community to come take part and be apart of the team. But on a separate note, as far as starting a business, I was lucky enough that I have a degree in civil engineering and I’ve always been an internet geek, that I was able to start something from scratch. I started an internet marketing company with my brother in law. I would just say for the guys out there, wrestling is not the end all. There is life after wrestling. You just have to stay motivated. It’s like in the book where I talk about finding motivation for being in the gym, the same goes for life outside wrestling. Gotta be motivated to go make money. Be innovative. Be entrepreneurial. Don’t get caught up in the rat race cause if you’re wrestling, you don’t wanna be in the rat race anyway. You’re meant for something different with all the ways to make money out there. I encourage guys that if that happens, call me, tweet me, I’d be happy to chat with you. I do start ups all the time and we help brand new companies with their branding and with their digital marketing. Any of those guys, man, I’m happy to have a free consult, sit down to do a phone conference, and hopefully get ’em on the right path.”
Working NXT Redemption:
“It was the best thing that ever happened to us. Before, when on Smackdown and RAW, things were happening so quick, we would just sit there and hope for a match. If we got one, it was really short and there’s no time for promos. We couldn’t develop our characters. And all of a sudden, while on the C show, Vince just didn’t care about that. It was obvious because the writers were like, “Well, they don’t care so do whatever you want.” Tom was one of the main writers and he just came up with these great ideas, he came from a soap opera background, so he loved storylines. He was into writing not just a story for this week, but a story for five or six weeks, which as you saw, was something that happened. And we got tons of mic time, long matches, and I loved it. Hawkins loved it. It helped us develop our characters. And we had this miniature cult following and they loved it. Some people on social media were just saying that NXT Redemption was better than RAW and Smackdown. I don’t know if that’s true, but I had a great time. I enjoyed the fact that the fans loved it and they appreciated it and they liked the storylines and matches. We’re not Jerichos, we’re not Ortons, we’re not Cenas, we don’t have that many years under our belt, but we had a good time. And we think it was pretty entertaining.”
Why the original NXT: Redemption format fell through:
“I think it was just a lack of anybody in a position to make decisions that cared. I just think it was kind of fallen off the radar, they had too much going on. The competition, it just started going on forever. The writers didn’t really think past this week, they never really thought into the future, it’s just what’s going on that week. “Okay, we’ve got Cena to wrestle, we’ve got Orton to wrestle, these guys wrestle. We’ll spend two minutes writing NXT.” That kind of thing. So it just kind of became it’s own different show, the whole competition just suddenly disappeared! (laughs) Nobody had any idea what was going on.”
To read the full interview with Tyler Reks, click here.